BIOGRAPHY | KATE MARCH, Ph.D. Dr. Kate March is an interdisciplinary performance scholar, artist, educator, filmmaker, and creative director whose work spans scholarship, performance, film, and public engagement. Working at the intersections of performance studies, feminist disability studies, medical humanities, and arts-based research, she investigates how creative practice generates new ways of understanding and articulating chronic illness, gendered pain, reproductive experiences, embodiment, care, and women's lived experiences.
Her interdisciplinary research originated in her own lived experience of endometriosis and culminated in a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (2024). Integrating feminist theory, feminist disability studies, crip theory, performance studies, and practice-as-research, her doctoral research developed the original feminist-crip praxis of netherness—a practice-based theoretical framework for investigating chronic pain through artistic inquiry. Her scholarship appears in Choreographic Practices and The "Female" Dancer (Routledge), with forthcoming publications in Dance, Movement & Spiritualities and The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Disability.
Kate currently serves as Adjunct Faculty at the College of Charleston, where she teaches interdisciplinary undergraduate courses in Medical Humanities and Women's & Gender Studies. Her teaching draws upon performance studies, feminist disability studies, and arts-based research to examine embodiment, illness, ethics, gender, and lived experience through critical and creative inquiry. She has also lectured and led workshops internationally at institutions including Connecticut College, Middlesex University, the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, and the Medical University of South Carolina.
Alongside her academic practice, Kate has spent more than a decade creating interdisciplinary performances, immersive theatre, dance films, painting performances, and site-responsive works presented throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. As founder and creative director of MARCH Art House (formerly I AM), she pioneered immersive performance experiences that dissolve conventional boundaries between performer and audience by combining dance, theatre, improvisation, visual art, and participatory installation. Her work has been presented in Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Thailand, China, India, Australia, the Maldives, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Her creative practice spans live performance, choreography, filmmaking, painting performance, theatre direction, installation, and public scholarship. Her live painting performances have been commissioned internationally by museums, galleries, festivals, cultural institutions, and private collectors, including the National Arts Club (New York), Art Central Hong Kong, BMW Hong Kong, and the Eugénio de Almeida Foundation in Portugal. Her immersive theatre production An Evening of Meat completed a critically acclaimed 55-performance run at London's Vault Festival, generating more than forty articles and reviews. She has also written, produced, and directed numerous evening-length theatrical works, including Love Pings, which premiered in Hong Kong before touring to Singapore, and has developed internationally screened dance films including UNDER | WATER, Nether Space(s), and Archived Womb. Kate's work has been presented, exhibited, and taught through institutions including the Gibbes Museum of Art, The Place (London), Connecticut College, the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, Middlesex University, the Medical University of South Carolina, and the College of Charleston. In 2015, she delivered a TEDx talk in Hong Kong, launching an international speaking practice centered on creativity, performance, and embodied experience. Across both scholarship and artistic practice, Kate develops performance not only as an artistic medium, but as a mode of research, public dialogue, and cultural transformation.